::Adoption::

Adoption Advice: click here if you would like to learn along with us and/or from our mistakes.

Please do:

Use considerate adoption language, i.e., don't ask us about the real parents; we do not plan to be synthetic. Need a little help with this? Visit the link above.

Pray for our children, that they be healthy and have loving friends.

Pray that the Lord will prepare our children for the adventure/stress of leaving their country and language.

Please don't:

Burden us with every adoption horror story you have ever heard. We don't (I hope) assault pregnant women with stories of still-borns and other heart-breaks; why do people feel that it is okay to do this to adoptive parents? I've heard plenty already.

Assume that we are doing this out of sheer goodness and say things like "that's so good of you to do this." While we do hope to do some good in their lives, we are also motivated by a keen desire to be parents and build a family. We have a mixture of motives, but being noble and self-sacrificing is not necessarily one of them. We are willing to be noble and self-sacrificing at times (as is any parent), but that's not why we are adopting.

Great article:

'Does she cry in Korean?' Parents get questions when raising adopted kids

Bill Dawson
August 10, 2005 ADOVARONLINE0810

Adoptive parents of foreign-born kids get these questions all the time:
“Is she your real daughter?”

“How will you teach him English?”

“How much did she cost?”

Kris Huson of Children’s Home Society and Family Services in St. Paul calls these “the grocery store questions.” Though usually well-intended, they can make an adoptive parent cringe.

Or laugh. “Does she cry in Korean?” is one of the bizarre questions asked of Kim Brown, adoptive mother of a 2-year-old daughter.

“I always thought babies cried in a universal language,” says Brown, who lives in Crow’s Landing, Calif.

My wife, Ila, and I, who adopted a baby girl named Sonali from India, are constantly amused at what people say.

Ila, who is of Indian descent, had a co-worker tell her, “It’s so amazing you were able to get such a beautiful child from such a poor country.”

Hmm.

Mary Sjoberg of Apple Valley got a similar jolt after she decided to adopt a child from Calcutta. Her aunt asked, “Oh, are you going to India to adopt because they’re so smart in math?”

Kristin Vonnegut’s mother asked, “Are you going to become Buddhist?” after Vonnegut decided to adopt from India.

“Which is funny,” says Vonnegut of Avon, Minn.,“because most Indians aren’t Buddhist.” Vonnegut’s father-in-law wondered why she wasn’t adopting from Mexico, where “they’re so much more docile.”

Speak to me

Ila and I also have discovered that curiosity around language abounds when you adopt a child, even a non-speaking infant.

“Is she learning English?” is a popular question. Sjoberg, a teacher, was surprised to hear this from a colleague.

“My school is half ELL [English Language Learners], so, excuse me?” says Sjoberg. She adopted Kiran, now 4, when the child was 8 months old.

Kristi Jenkins of Marion, Ill., will soon be united with a 20-month-old boy from Mumbai, formerly Bombay. She’s also mom to two stepchildren and one biological child. Her stock answer for those who wonder how she’ll be able to communicate with her newest child?

“I tell them, we didn’t understand our biological daughter when she spoke to us in English at 20 months,” Jenkins says.

Harsher words

Not all comments are so amusing.

Before her baby joined her, Sjoberg was asked if her little girl would be “dots or feathers.” Sjoberg was baffled until the questioner explained that dots meant dots on the forehead —India-born —and feathers meant feathers in the hair — American Indian.

She’s also heard, “Thank God she’s here and growing up a Christian,” and, from an elderly man in Hoyt Lakes, Minn.: “If you rub her skin, will that make her lighter?”

Others stand out:

“Does that dot on his forehead scratch off?”

“I couldn’t bring a person like that into my home.”

“Aren’t you afraid people will think he’s Middle Eastern?”

The last came from a co-worker who said, “People will think he’s a terrorist,” prompting Jenkins to ask, “How can a 20-month-old be a terrorist?”

Jenkins blames some of this on where she lives in Illinois. “I think I’m kind of in redneck land here, and I think there still is a lot of racism.”

But similar comments are heard in Minnesota, which has the nation’s highest rate of foreign adoptions per capita.

Ask Becky Steeber, who works at Children’s Home Society and is an adoptive mother of three. A physician tending to one of Steeber’s adopted boys, who has spina bifida, asked, “Do they [the adoption agency] have any healthy white kids?”

“One of most appalling comments I ever got,” Steeber says.

What’s worse, Sjoberg said, is that often, “they’ll ask these questions right in front of the child. It really amazes me how people can be so … unsmart. I really want to say stupid.”

Brown sees this as a growing challenge now that her daughter is getting old enough to understand what is being said about her.

“I have to think how Natalie is going to think about these questions,” says Brown. “I don’t want her saying, ‘Are you my real mother?’ ‘Do you love me as much as your other kids?’\u2009”

Cautious questions

So what is the right thing to ask? First, know that adoptive parents aren’t hypersensitive souls who parse every statement, looking for something offensive. We love talking about our kids. And we understand that most people aren’t trying to be insensitive; they just don’t know how, or sometimes what, to ask.

Still, when addressing an adoptive parent, you might want to rethink the following questions:

“How much did he cost?”

What you probably mean is, “How much did the adoption process cost?” That varies, with much of the cost going to administrative fees. “It’s not just paying someone off and taking a child across the world,” Brown says. Some parents find this an intrusive question, others are happy to answer, but none of us likes to think of our kids as having price tags on their foreheads.

“What happened to her real mom?”

We know you mean “birth” or “biological” mom, but it’s still a sore semantic subject. Adoptive parents are real parents and some can get really touchy about this. Try to use the b-words, birth or biological, and we’ll try to understand when you forget.

“Why did you adopt overseas when there are so many children here?”

Multiple reasons. One is the domestic adoption laws that give U.S. birth mothers time to change their mind and reclaim the child. Bonding with a child, and then losing him or her to the birth mother, is heartbreaking, especially for couples who adopt because of infertility. This seldom happens with foreign adoptions.

“Why was he put up for adoption?”

A fair question, but don’t be offended if we decline to answer. Many parents consider the details private, and want the child, when he or she is old enough to understand, to know this information before others do.

“Do you get to go to an orphanage and pick one out?”

No, it’s not like choosing a puppy at a kennel. Usually, the prospective parents submit a preference for a boy or girl, a range of ages, and whether they’d be willing to take on a “special needs” child, which is usually a youngster with a disability or health concern. The agency or service eventually sends them the picture and profile of a possible “match,” which parents can accept or refuse. If they refuse, they’ll get another match, until they finally find the right child for them.

“Isn’t she lucky, being raised by loving parents in the U.S.?”

Sure, but it works both ways. Adoptive parents feel immensely lucky and blessed themselves. Even non-religious couples often feel that Providence has stepped in and given them the perfect child.

For more information: http://www.childrenshomeadopt.org

Bill Dawson is at wdawson@startribune.com.